(Other that wasting time on message boards when you should be writing employee reviews. Yes, it is that time of year.)
For me it’s the Recycle Bin. I used to have a horribly stupid habit of sending an file to the Bin and then immediately going to the Bin empty it. This is, obviously, pointless, as the Bin will slowly ditch its contents after it reaches a certain percentage of your hard disk space, and you can control that amount; and also because as you can set Windows to bypass the Bin entirely anyway. Moreover, that old habit of mine defeats the purpose of the Bin, which is to allow the user to easily retrieve a file which has proven needful after being deleted.
But the Bin being full that way just looks untidy, and I am compulsive about that sort of thing. I am forever reminding myself not to empty the Bin for no good reason.
Anyway,that’s me. What are your bad computer habits?
Saving everything directly to the C: Drive instead of placing it in folders for the sake of organization. I console myself by saying I’m better than my wife who saves everything directly to the desktop.
I seem to share your compulsion, seeing as I always permanently delete stuff using shift+del – I too can’t stand having stuff in the recycle bin. It just seems the ‘proper’ way to do things to me.
I have the reverse issue. Being compulsive, I spend way too much time not merely making sure I put everything in the appropriate folder, but also appending pointless tags.
I have managed to get around this by hiding all desktop icons, which looks neater anyway. It still bothers me knowing that the unemptied bin is sitting there, invisibly mocking me, but the urge to empty it is manageable until I actually see it.
The solution here, of course, is to use a naked picture of Natalie Portman as desktop wallpaper. Obviously I’m not going to clutter up THAT with silly icons.
Backups. I tend to spot-backup certain things - throw a folder over on another computer, or copy it to a DVD every few months, or email myself an important file through my gmail account so it lives there forever.
I should have ongoing daily backups. I know it; I worked for years at a software company who published one of the major backup applications in use today. I know how backup software works, I know the right theories & methods of backup up, I have no excuses. Part of me looks at hard drive crashes as a forced spring cleaning.
Oh! I’m bad about backups too (better than some though, at least I do them occasionally). I do them scrupulously at work, daily, hourly, onsite, offsite, but I got a message on my home machine saying I hadn’t backed up my machine in 200 days or something. You see, about 100 days ago I took apart my home backup drive for something, and haven’t exactly gotten around to assembling it again.
I constantly click the screen and highlight things at random when I’m reading. I mean, constantly. I hardly notice myself doing it*, but it drives people reading over my shoulder crazy.
I suspect it’s a symptom of my undiagnosed ADD.
Excapt when reading the New York Times. The bastards.
That makes three of us. Granted I use a laptop so my mousepad is simultaneously scroll wheel and right/left click, but still… scrollscrollscroll CRAP I JUST HIGHLIGHTED THE WHOLE PAGE! :rolleyes:
I’m extremely anal about organization of my folders. A place for everything and everything in its… wherever is convenient at the time.
My desktop has files that stretch off of the right side of the screen by several feet. I blame my brother who copied every file on his camera to my PC.
When I was younger my dad made me buy my own mouse to use with the family computer. He said I wasn’t allowed to use the family’s mouse because, “A mouse comes with a certain number of clicks in its lifetime, and you’re wasting all of them.”
I do the bin thing as well. In fact, ever since I discovered shift+del, I dispense with it entirely. A full bin is just untidy, isn’t it ?
ETA : maybe not a bad habit per se, but an idiosyncracy : I use the mouse as little as possible. If it can be done with a keyboard shortcut, it will be. Instead of clicking on the icon I want on the desktop, I’ll press “home” to highlight the first icon, and navigate with the cursor keys.
Fifth’d! I think I do it subconsciously as a placeholder, so if I look away from a large block of text for a moment, I’ll be able to find the point where I left off much more easily.
I don’t think that’s a bad habit. I deliberately use the keyboard as much as possible, because it’s often faster and because, if I find myself with a non-functioning trackpad or mouse, I’ll be used to it and thus better able to deal with the problem.
I have no bad computer habits, I am one with computers.
Ok, really, it’s backups. Backups at work are done automatically but at home I never got in the habit of doing it beyond just emailing myself documents despite screwing myself a couple times. Also, I have a habit from the bad old days of AutoCAD where I type with my left hand and keep my right hand on the mouse. At times, I do this for minutes without actually needing the mouse for anything which wastes a lot of time…on the plus side it annoys my co-workers that I can type with one hand.
